Disney’s Moana and the Portrayal of Moral Personhood in Hollywood’s Pacific (1932-2016)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The goal of this essay is not to build an argument about the commercial basis or ideological functions of Hollywood movies. My goal is exegetical or methodological. I want to shift the critique of Hollywood’s representations of Pacific peoples and cultures towards how they are and are not depicted as moral persons, the meaning of which I will detail below. I begin by introducing the concept of the moral person in social anthropology and in the work of the Canadian literary critic, Northrop Frye. I then examine three Hollywood movies, Rain (1932) and Blue Hawaii (1961) in which the moral personhood of Pacific Islanders is reduced and marginalized while Western protagonists are foregrounded, although in different ways. Lastly, I discuss Disney’s Moana (2016), a movie which excludes Western characters altogether by focusing on the adventures of a pre-contact Polynesian girl. Moana is able to do so, I propose, because it is an animated musical.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.010 | 0.009 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".